Another writer of fiction, whose bent of mind, if sombre, was far from devoid of ironical humour, has occupied a deal of my leisure here--George Gissing. I rank him very high among the Victorian novelists. His work deserves a higher place than it is usually accorded by the critics. He was a fine story-teller, and for me (though their topographical appeal is not, perhaps, very obvious) his books are very closely packed with living human interest. But again, for such an one as myself, so situated, I would not say that a course of Gissing formed particularly wholesome or digestible reading. Here, for example, is a passage associated in my recollection with a night which was among the worst I have spent in this place: _He thought of the wretched millions of mankind to whom life is so barren that they must needs believe in a recompense beyond the grave. For that he neither looked nor longed. The bitterness of his lot was that this world might be a sufficing Paradise to him, if only he could clutch a poor little share of current coin...._ No, for such folk as I, that was not good reading. But--and let this be my tribute to an author who won my very sincere esteem and respect--when morning had come, after a bad night, and I had had my dawn lesson from Nature, and my converse with Punch, I turned me to another volume of Gissing, and with a quieter mind read this: _Below me, but far off, is the summer sea, still, silent, its ever changing blue and green dimmed at the long limit with luminous noon-tide mist. Inland spreads the undulant vastness of the sheep-spotted downs; beyond them the tillage and the woods of Sussex weald, coloured like to the pure sky above them, but in deeper tint. Near by, all but hidden among trees in yon lovely hollow, lies an old, old hamlet, its brown roofs decked with golden lichen; I see the low church tower, and the little graveyard about it. Meanwhile, high in the heaven, a lark is singing. It descends, it drops to its nest, and I could dream that half the happiness of its exultant song was love of England...._ That is his little picture of a recollection of summer. And then, returning to his realities of the moment, this miscalled 'savage' pessimist and 'pitiless realist' continues thus: _It is all but dark. For a quarter of an hour I must have been writing by a glow of firelight reflected on my desk; it seemed to me the sun of summer. Snow is still falling. I can see its ghostly glimmer against the vanishing sky. To-morrow it will be thick upon my garden, and perchance for several days. But when it melts, when it melts, it will leave the snow-drop. The crocus, too, is waiting, down there under the white mantle which warms the earth._ But I would not say that even this was well-chosen reading for me--here in my bush hermitage--any more than is that masterpiece of Kipling's later concentration, _An Habitation Enforced_, followed by its inimitable _Recall_: